Bitcoin Lightning Network Reaches Record 510 BTC Capacity

The Lightning Network (LN) has reached a new record. It has surpassed 510 BTC capacity and the number of channels grew over 26% in the last month. Bitcoin developers are working in order to improve it and launch it to the market as soon as possible. At the moment there is no specific date for it to be released. The information has been provided by 1ml.com.

Bitcoin Lightning Network Expands

Although Bitcoin has been in a bear trend since the beginning of the year, developers keep working in order for it to be able to support larger transactions and be more secure. The number of nodes in the last 30 days has increased by 14.38% reaching 4,812.

In the last six months, the capacity in the network has also increased more than 200%. Now, LN has a capacity of 511 BTC, close to $2 million. Following data provided by Bitcoin Visuals, the daily median capacity of each channel was 1.1m Satoshis at the beginning of November. Although the market plummetted in mid-November, the number of Satoshis supported by each channel grew up to 3.25 million Satoshis.

The Lightning Network has been created in order to help Bitcoin scale. When the most popular virtual currency reached its highest price, the number of transactions on the network generated high fees and low processing times. This is due to the fact that Bitcoin is not prepared to support this amount of transactions. This is why creating a second layer solution, Bitcoin would be able to process millions of transactions for just a few Satoshis.

The network has also almost 16,000 channels, an increase of 26.6% compared to the last month. There are some companies that are starting to implement the Lightning Network in order to test it and search for bugs.

A few days ago, an artist decided to sell his art piece for less than a cent using the Lightning Network. The author of this art piece published the story on Reddit for people to comment about it and learn how the technology works. He sold his art piece for 1 millisatoshi ($0.000000037).

He wrote on the matter:

“I’m excited about a future where micropayments are omnipresent. Artists paid by the view, writers by the poem, musicians by the listen. Everyday interactions complemented by positive monetary reinforcement such as tipping someone who let you merge into traffic.”